Syria → Oxford University

It certainly wasn't an easy experience. Our hospital got bombed multiple times, and I was actually in the hospital when it happened, so in many ways it was very stressful and difficult. You have to imagine a country in conflict: you don't have the necessities — electricity, sometimes water — and the country is cut off from the international system. You can't send money into the country or receive money from outside. If you want to do anything involving international applications or tests, you have to travel to another country to do it. Funnily enough, when I was sitting the TOEFL and IELTS exams, I had to travel to neighbouring Lebanon to take them, because nothing was available in Syria.

So it was an experience that helped me build a lot of resilience, and it exposed me to taking risks. And I'll tell you why I think that's important. I had a very big dream — I knew I wanted to have a massive impact on healthcare, to build the network, resources and capabilities to do that, to play a transformative role. But those opportunities weren't immediately available to me as a medical student or resident there. So I was in an environment that mandated I take risks in order to position myself for the goals I wanted to achieve. I did a lot of work on building capacity, started multiple organisations, did a lot of research — a lot of things outside the comfort zone. And I was forced to do those things, because they were the steps I needed to create opportunities and optionality for myself.

I think this is really important. When you exist in a system with limited opportunities, it creates a kind of pressure, and you need to think about that as a blessing — because you learn the most from the times when you take risks and drive yourself outside your comfort zone, doing things where you are absolutely accountable for the result. That really maximises your iterative learning cycle. It made me much more comfortable with taking risks, with doing untraditional things, with exploring avenues I wasn't familiar with. Mostly it was a difficult experience, but the resilience and grit you build in those circumstances is very important, and the comfort you develop with handling uncertainty is a fundamental aspect of who I am today. It really helped me — whether in my educational endeavours or when I was starting companies. So I think it was a fundamental experience, if that makes sense.

It's a really good question. Just a couple of words about my background first — but before that, I don't think I'm special in any way. I fundamentally believe you have to be a really good specialist and a good person, you have to work really hard, and you have to work smart. But success is also about being in the right place at the right time. The luck aspect is something I think is very important, and I'd never discount it. I've put in tremendous effort and made tremendous sacrifices to get where I am, but luck mattered too.

My family and I used to live in a small town in the north of Syria until 2014, when we had to relocate to a city called Latakia. It was a little traumatic, because we had to move after our town was taken over by Al-Qaeda-affiliated extremists. During my medical education and residency years, I knew I had this massive ambition, this massive dream, and I did everything I could to get there. I was really interested in research — we didn't do enough research in Syria, the ecosystem was very underdeveloped — so I started working on that. I learned how to do research, assembled a team, and we became one of the first student teams to publish out of Syria. It was doing things that were entrepreneurial — not in the sense of starting a business for profit, but doing things that were untraditional, unconventional, new.

Another thing is that I was really blessed to have very good mentors. Having good mentors is one of the most important things. When I was a medical student, I reached out to Syrian medical doctors abroad, trying to establish connections. I did some electives outside Syria. Those people were so fundamental to my trajectory and my journey.

It's a good question. An important factor is that when you look at success in hindsight, the path seems linear, but in reality it's not linear at all. Oxford wasn't my only option — I didn't have the dream or goal of studying at Oxford or becoming a Rhodes Scholar. My goal was to be in a place that would give me a lot of opportunities: any very good educational institution, one of the top ones, that would give me the optionality to pursue a career at the intersection of innovation, finance and healthcare, and to have a massive impact.

So the natural question became: how do I get onto that path? I'm in Syria — what opportunities are available to me as a student here? A couple of scholarships in the UK and the US, a couple of top schools you can apply to. Okay, fine. What do I need to do today to be in a position where they'd take me credibly? You have to sit a couple of tests, build connections with mentors, do some really interesting projects to demonstrate that you're passionate about making an impact on healthcare, about changing the status quo. So it was essentially an optimisation task. You know where you hope to be in the future, you know where you are today, and the path between the two is uncertain — but you can have really good visibility on the next step you need to take. Then you execute very well on that step, and the next one, and you have the grit and determination to keep going, step after step.

One of the really key factors I'd stress is building good connections with mentors and building credibility with them — and being receptive to learning. I tend towards generalist thinking, and we all tend to view the world, and how we want to achieve things, through our own lens, which is inevitably biased and inevitably lacks the experience of how to actually get there. It's always important to optimise how you think you'll do something against what reality requires — to be very open to iterating on your beliefs, your approaches, your capabilities. You do that by trying and failing. One of the most important things is becoming a student of failure. You learn the most from failures, not from successes. So maybe one thing I didn't mention is being comfortable with failure — being self-reflective enough that you're comfortable and confident with your own failure, and you look at it as a step on a success trajectory. No one who's super successful hasn't had failure before; I can assure you failure was a key point on their trajectory.

It's a very good question. Just to clarify: my thesis was on rolling out a centralised electronic health records system using open-source solutions. The WHO ended up backing the proposal. Implementation hasn't started yet, but fingers crossed it will soon.

This goes to a fundamental belief about whether you think the future of healthcare is digital or not. I understand that the most immediate needs of healthcare in Syria aren't digitisation. But at the same time, you can't postpone digitisation until you've met all the basic needs, for two reasons. First, digital gives you significant capabilities in actually addressing healthcare needs in low- and middle-income settings. I can tell you countless cases of cancer patients treated in one hospital in Syria who lost their records there — they move to another city, they go to a physician who wants to start their treatment, and he has no clue what treatments they were on at the previous hospital. And you can scale that; that's only one example. Another is simply keeping track of spending, or of healthcare services on a national or regional level. A system you cannot measure is a system that will inevitably fail — because if you cannot measure, you cannot improve, and if you cannot improve, you will fail.

So the value of digital in low-resource settings comes from these basics. You don't have to implement something very complex. You don't need the most interoperable, fanciest electronic health record system — the Epic or Cerner version. You implement something basic that works and gives you the ability to address these needs.

The other thing is that you have to look at digital as an iterative process. We don't just say, today we digitise and next year we've digitised. There's a massive learning curve the whole healthcare system has to travel. If you implement electronic health records in a hospital, you have to train the staff, and they have to become competent. You have to build health informatics capacity in the country — you might be graduating computer scientists, but those computer scientists have never worked on a health informatics project, so you need appropriate training for people in that space. You need digitisation across the different components of the healthcare system — the ministry, the health insurers, and so on. All of this takes massive time, and you need to start somewhere and build those blocks one by one. It's because of this curve that starting early with a basic version is very important. So while the argument that we need to address basic needs is valid, that doesn't mean we shouldn't start digitisation — because digitisation can actually help us with those needs too.

Thanks, Musty. I believe in outsourcing. The most valuable asset you have is your time, and when you have an opportunity to outsource some of your tasks — things that don't require massive thinking or commitment from you, things that are admin in nature — then by all means do it. That's what I try to do; I'm a huge believer in outsourcing. If you can outsource something, do it.

Another way I look at it is through the lens of specialisation. Specialisation improves efficiency in general — whether it's how specific companies specialise in specific products to improve quality, or how countries specialise in specific industries. It's a generalist concept, and I think humans should specialise too, even in how you manage your daily tasks.

The other thing — and I've learned this from multiple projects, including from working in finance — is that process is very important. Knowing when you have to deliver something, maybe a week or a couple of weeks in advance, and setting up a working pace: you know that on this day you have to finish this amount, and on another day this amount, and going through that process matters.

Another thing I find personally helpful — and this is purely personal — is having a specific structure to your day. I focus best in the morning, so I have a block of about four to five hours, say 5am to 10am, that I reserve for the tasks that require the most mental processing. This is really important, because in daily life we're exposed to a continuous barrage of notifications and communications, and that can throw you off if you're working on something that requires high concentration. So I try to have these compartments of time blocked for high-concentration activity.

The last thing I'd say — and I'm not doing the best at this, I'm trying to improve — is really paying attention to your wellness. Today we're under massive pressure to work very long hours and very hard to achieve our goals. Just taking a little time — it doesn't have to be a lot — to understand what works for you in terms of wellness, and how you can take care of your mental health, is very important. It can be very different for different people. For me, going for a morning run, or having a meditation session in the morning, is great — I feel awesome after it. Other things work for other people.

One of the interesting analogies came from someone I have massive respect for: Alex Dibelius, who was a Global Chairman at Goldman Sachs and is a cardiac surgeon by training. He told me that a bird cannot fly with one wing. If one wing is your professional capabilities, the other is your wellness — how well you are to execute on your best capability. You have to pay attention to the professional aspect of your life, but also to the personal, wellness aspect — whether through activities or spending time with family. That's really subjective.

That's a great question. My first recommendation would be a book called Bulletproof Problem Solving. I found it very interesting because it speaks to the skill of problem solving. Whatever you do in life, you'll have to problem solve, and developing a consistent skill and a solid approach to it applies to anything. It's very important to build these fundamental skill blocks, and I view problem solving — and this book in particular — as super valuable in doing that.

The other book is How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen, who was a professor at HBS. It speaks about the importance of understanding your intrinsic motivation. So many people go after extrinsic motivation alone — money, prestige, whatever. But if you want to do something big, and go on a career track that's really difficult, external motivation isn't enough. You need internal motivation. Another way to say it: you need to understand your mission, and be connected to it, because that's the only thing that will power you through the difficult moments you'll inevitably face.